In order to satisfy increasing demands of radio data traffic after the commercialization of a 4G communication system, much effort is made to develop an advanced 5G communication system or a pre-5G communication system. For this reason, the 5G communication system or the pre-5G communication system is also referred to as a beyond-4G network communication system or a post-LTE system.
In order to accomplish a higher data transfer rate, the 5G communication system considers implementation at a super-high frequency (mmWave) band (e.g., such as a 60 GHz band). In order to obviate a path loss of a radio wave and to increase a delivery distance of a radio wave at the super-high frequency band, various techniques such as a beamforming, a massive MIMO, a full dimensional MIMO (FD-MIMO), an array antenna, an analog beam-forming, and a large scale antenna are discussed in the 5G communication system.
Additionally, for an improvement in network of the 5G communication system, technical developments are made in an advanced small cell, a cloud radio access network (cloud RAN), an ultra-dense network, a device to device (D2D) communication, a wireless backhaul, a moving network, a cooperative communication, coordinated multi-points (CoMP), a reception interference cancellation, and the like.
Besides, in the 5G communication system, a hybrid FSK and QAM modulation (FQAM) and a sliding window superposition coding (SWSC) are developed as advanced coding modulation (ACM) schemes, and a filter bank multi carrier (FBMC), a non orthogonal multiple access (NOMA), and a sparse code multiple access (SCMA) are also developed as advanced access techniques.
In addition, according to the explosive growth of mobile traffic, a WLAN network that can be constructed at a low cost by using an unlicensed band is being reviewed as a strong offloading solution of a cellular operator which reaches the limit in handling traffic with only a cellular network. Most cellular operators construct a WLAN network themselves or cooperate with the existing WLAN operators and, if cellular base stations are incapable of handling subscribers' traffic in a crowded area, induce subscribers to be served through a wireless LAN access point.
The 3GPP standard adopts a structure in which both the cellular network and the WLAN access network are interworked at a gateway (PDN-GW) of a cellular core network such that a terminal can be continually served even in case of handover between the cellular network and the WLAN network. In this structure, even though handover is made between the cellular network and the WLAN, the terminal may not suffer disconnection of a service by maintaining the same IP address.
Therefore, a method and apparatus for selecting a transfer path of traffic for effectively delivering traffic in this system and thereby determining a traffic path are needed.